EXACTLY! No way in the world I'm putting Windows on my money-making creative machine. I installed Windows on Parallels two years ago because I wanted to use one app. I got a virus before I even finished installing it! I had to wipe my whole system and restore from a time machine backup. Nope, not a solution.

But it really is the best solution when you find yourself in this predicament.

You'll find Illustrator, Indesign and Premiere also work FAR faster within Windows 7 on your new Mac than within Mac OS X.

Yet Maya has similar performance in both Operating Systems on the same hardware. So I'd say that's Adobe's laziness and cost cutting on Mac development coming to the party. Perhaps a side effect of Apple's war on Flash, which was a side effect of Adobe's betrayal of their original agreements with Apple over creative software.

Not recently. Adobe's Product Manager for Visual Effects and Motion Graphics,Todd Kopriva, was a tremendous advocate for us at Adobe, but he is transitioning out of the company between now and NAB in April, and his successor, Victoria Nece, has yet to chime in on this as far as I can tell.

Do not connect to the internet, at all, when installing Windows on a Mac in bootcamp.

Download everything you need when in OS X. This is the safest and best way to run Windows. By a country mile. I never connect my windows machines directly to the internet. No need. And I don't like doing reinstalls.

Todd had mentioned on a previous thread that it was definitely an El Capitan and pixel redraw issue. Nothing much else from Adobe. It would be nice to hear that they are working on it, but no one has replied to this thread that I know of.

While bootcamp may be an option for some, it won't be for everyone, especially those that rely on ProRes codecs as part of their workflow. I used to take up for Adobe when others criticized them for treating the Mac platform as an afterthought. But, after train wrecks like this, I'm not so sure any more. Like I said earlier, this would have and should have been caught in beta testing. If it was, it wasn't communicated to the public very well.

Even a 1x1 pixel composition with nothing on it is unable to play back in realtime. The issue is indeed alleviated by hiding the playhead by maximizing the canvas, scrolling off to the side, or any other method that results in not displaying the scrolling red vertical line.

I won't attribute the mistake to malice, greed, or stupidity on the part of Adobe. I'm sure they're embarrassed, as they should be. But it seems that they're also trying to minimize attention to the issue by not formally acknowledging the gravity of the problem--they broke a part of almost every OSX user's workflow.

If they were interested in building back a bit of goodwill, here's what they could say, in a blog post: "We're sorry that we unintentionally crippled what we acknowledge to be an integral function and we're working hard to fix it." Also, why not humor us with an insider's explanation of the issue?

FWIW, I'm getting this exact same issue on Yosemite with both CC2015 and CC2014. But rendering wasn't broken until I installed CC2015. I've tried all of the fixes mentioned in this thread (renaming folders, static mouse, changing options, not having playhead visible, maximizing comp viewer, single monitor, etc.) and nothing works, even temporarily. Cached frames won't playback in realtime, period. It doesn't matter what the resolution or content is.

I know you Adobe guys are working hard to fix this. You're amazing, and create phenomenal software. Thanks for all you do!

Jumped for joy this morning when I saw a new updated along with Adobe's release notes citing, "improvements to Cache Before Playback previews." After Effects now feels like it's caching slightly quicker but it's still not previewing in real-time.

Well, at least in the interim we can be sure Adobe will be in touch with all the CC OSX users to keep us posted and apologise. Maybe let us know they understand their actions significantly impacted a frequent-use feature fundamental to our workflow, and would like to compensate for the money and time this has directly cost us by way of reduced CC license cost for the duration of the bug.

We've been working with Apple on the main issue preventing real-time playback on Mac OSX v10.11, and we have a good understanding of the problem. Apple made a change to an API for drawing items to the screen in Mac OSX v10.11 (El Capitan). That change, coupled with some drawing changes for the Timeline panel that we made in After Effects CC 2015 (13.5), causes the entire Timeline panel to be redrawn each time that only a subset of the Timeline panel should be redrawn (e.g., when the preview time indicator moves, the whole panel is being redrawn to the screen instead of just the part that has changed).

As others have mentioned on this thread, current workarounds include hiding the Timeline panel or changing the view of the Timeline panel to not include the preview time indicator.

I don't want to publicly commit to dates right now, since we need to make sure that we get this right, and we'll likely be including some other major fixes at the same time, and both of those factors add uncertainty to timing.

I'm on Yosemite (OS X 10.10.2) and I'm still having the exact same issue, even with the preview time indicator off screen or the Timeline panel hidden. The CC2015 release (13.8, I think?) that dropped today didn't fix anything for me.

We have been working for a while to isolate and understand the behavior, and we have discussed this bug in various threads on this forum as we have tried to get user feedback on this and related issues.

This bug has been discussed in this forum, but no word in any release note, nothing like, known bugs, problems, issues, there's no official information, just people wondering and discussing the mater in this forum and just you addressing it once in a while.

When I discovered the bug coming with my brand new Mac which comes with El Capitan preinstalled, I had a chat with an Adobe employee and he really tried hard to deny the bug, telling me that After Effects was not Premiere and was not meant to be real time!

It would be funny if this wasn't a tool I use for a living.

At the end of the conversation the person I was chatting with, told me that they were going to call me later and I'm still waiting (it's been two months now).

So maybe you're not denying it as person, but this bug is huge and it's not happening in a bizarre hardware configuration, it's happening in the most advanced OS of the latest machines from the biggest company, and you're acting as if it was some cute little bug that can still wait a few months before being solved.

I really think that this is not the proper attitude, this is not the way a company should behave with its costumers.

Thanks for the update. I appreciate the clarity on the current situation.

Some of us (myself included) don't spend a lot of time here unless we have an issue. I missed the thread where you left feedback, and I could't find the thread that I thought you commented on about this problem.

Maybe a sticky at the top of this forum would be helpful for "known issues" or a quick post on the Region of Interest blog about current "known issues" with After Effects. That way we wouldn't have 10 different topics about ram preview issues with El Capitan.

That's exactly the problem, Todd. Discussing this bug in a forum is as far as Adobe went. I had two massive jobs after receiving my new imac, and spent so many days and weekends - up till 6am on one Monday morning - to hit deadline on these jobs. If I had known about the workaround and not assumed (maybe naively) that I was just pushing the mac too hard, I wouldn't have been in that position. I was pissed off about spending so much on a 5K imac with such disappointing results, whilst hammering away trying to work out what I'd done wrong with the comps to chug so desperately over my motion.

It wasn't till after the dust settled on those jobs that I had time to mull over and realise something wasn't right - then I hit the forum. I should have had an email notifying me of this bug. Adobe CC is not cheap. I get better communication from freeware apps.

Just understand that on the end of your apps are people trying to run businesses.

Seems like AE can't handle the timeline and preview in view at the same time. My colleague found a work around; maximize any other panels, besides the timeline, so the timeline isn't in view. Then try RAM preview. Worked for me.

Seems like AE can't handle the timeline and preview in view at the same time. My colleague found a work around; maximize any other panels, besides the timeline, so the timeline isn't in view. Then try RAM preview. Worked for me.

Thanks for chiming in. This has been mentioned though. In fact, last week we had input from Todd on Adobe's AE team. He came in here, explained the actual problem, why it's taken so long to figure out a fix, and that the fix is targeted for the next update. Hooray!

There are some easy ways to work around this until the fix comes. Here are the two that spring to my mind:

Yes but the reply of the Adobe's team is a bit worring because they claim that the bug comes from the new 10.11 API. Ok, fine.

The only problem is that I'm on 10.10.5 and I have this exact same bug too, and I'm not the only one (ChadPerkins mention this fact into the thread, no reply from Adobe).

So I'm not sure that the next update will fix anything since Adobe's team seems not understand what is the problem.

(To prevent any time consuming useless discussion: Yes, it is the exact same bug that I am talking about. The Ram preview plays ok, at realtime, when the timline panel is hidden and using the ` key too maximise the preview window to hide the timeline during the playback works for me too. So it is the exact same bug that we are talking about)

I've pinpointed the issue for me. It would seem that having the playhead slider visible whilst previewing makes everything slow down. If I pick a place to preview from, move across the timeline so the slider isn't visible, ram preview works fine.

Perfect solution. And weird! But that works. I was having the same issues everybody has, even with AE 13.7 / El Capitan.

I'm still also waiting for my reduced monthly CC license costs to recompense for the genuine and causal impact to my time and costs during the period I spent ignorantly wrestling with my motion projects, which could have been easily prevented by a quick email alert from Adobe just to alert me to the issue.

Hi! Having the same problem. The thing is that i update to el capitan and to after effects CC 13.7 at the same time, so i am not sure if it's about el capitan, or after effects cc 2015, or both.

After trying different "solutions" that i read on different forums, the only thing that seems to "work" is to use a one screen workspace and maximize the composition window to hide the timeline window.